


Catholics for the Crown

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Femslash February
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Long before she even knew who the Parker brothers were, May had a best friend. Her name was Mary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catholics for the Crown

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Femslash February!](http://soaringrachel.tumblr.com/post/40634004762/femslash-february) Movieverse, because Sally Fields' Aunt May is fabulous and because I wanted to give Mary Parker, you know, a role. 
> 
> I wrote this all in one go after, like, two months of writer's block, so it's largely unproofread and not fact-checked at all. I kind of attacked history with a pair of scissors, so shhh, just go with it :D
> 
>  **Warnings** for canonical levels of character death and its aftermath.

-

 

_have you seen my ghost?  
i'm the last one left and all my friends are dead_

 

-

 

 

It happened about a week and a half after the funeral, on a Tuesday night. May was in the fridge with a Sharpie, labeling Tupperware containers of casseroles by who they were from and when they were given, so they'd know the order they needed to be eaten up -- this one from Jaspar, that one from a teacher at Peter's school.

She thought Ben was in front of the TV, resting his eyes, because she could hear the sounds of some mindless sitcom playing, canned laughter sounding off periodically in case the viewer needed to be told what was funny, but he obviously wasn't, because he said suddenly, "Peter, are you watching the microwave?"

A beat of embarrassed silence followed, and then May looked up as Peter dragged the stepping stool over from the sink so he could lever himself up and punch quickly at the microwave button until the latch released.

She had just enough time to start, "Peter, be --" and she heard Ben's chair screech across the linoleum, but then Peter yelled and jerked and popcorn spilled everywhere, hot oil hissing as it made contact with the countertop.

May got there first, hooking one arm around Peter's middle and hauling him up and around, pinning him against the sink in a way that probably wasn't comfortable, but she wasn't paying attention, shoving his hand under a stream of cold water. Peter was sobbing; shocky, loud gulps that were probably more surprise and dismay than real pain. He kept bumping her chin with his head, turning it to cut quick looks across the counter, which had crackled and turned brown in places, burned clean through.

"Am I in trouble?" he wailed. "Aunt May, am I in trouble?"

May replied with something she hoped was reassuring, turning his hand over under the faucet. She couldn't tell if he was burned or not, but she rubbed her thumb over his hand anyway, like she could wash away a wound if there was one. The spray of popcorn had made it as far as the sink, kernels wilting to grey as they soaked through, disappearing down the drain.

Then, from behind her, a choked noise, quickly stifled into the back of a fist.

She looked over her shoulder, and it took her a moment to realize that Ben was crying, because it wasn't something he'd done a lot of before; his mouth morphed into this horrible, crumpled shape, tears falling fast in trails down his cheeks.

"What's the matter with you?" she demanded, thrown. "You don't even like those countertops. You think it's an ugly color."

"It's not _that."_ Of course it wasn't. He gripped the corners of the kitchen table like he was on a pitching ship, with no idea how to make the ground steady, no sea legs at all. "I thought, how am I going to explain it to Richard, when he comes back and finds his boy hurt? How --" he made a noise that May didn't have a name for, collected himself, and asked of the general direction of the window, "But he isn't, is he?"

And May thought -- of Richard, of Mary, about how they would probably fuss at them for Peter's sake, to show that they cared when he got hurt, but would have winked at them over Peter's head because they weren't really angry. Kids got hurt, that's what kids did, and next time, Peter would be more careful to listen for when the popcorn was done popping. And then she thought, _no,_ because she'd been the one they called in to identify Mary's body, since Mary didn't have any siblings or parents, and the smiling, winking, maternal Mary in her head replaced itself with the image of Mary's face in pieces, under the tarp, and how despite the gore, May had recognized her anyway.

Suddenly, just like that, they were all crying: May crumpled on the floor with Peter trapped between her knees, and Ben coming around the table, putting one hand on May's shoulder and one on the sink so he could lower himself down to the floor with them, gathering both of them up in his arms. May crying for Mary, Ben crying for his brother, Peter crying because they were crying, and because he was sorry for ruining the countertop and scared he was going to get in trouble, and probably smart enough to know that wasn't why they were really sad.

 

-

 

At seventeen, leaning against the sink with a raw steak pressed to his mouth, Peter ran his fingers over the cracked, browned edges of the linoleum and wondered, "When did this happen?"

May, off sterilizing a sewing needle over a mini-blowtorch they usually used for birthday candles and holding it up to the light of her work lamp, looked over, squinting through her bifocals.

"Oh, that?" She chuckled. "That's one of your stunning works of genius," and she told him about the time he tried to make popcorn. Maybe in his old house, he knew exactly how long to let the microwave go to get all the kernels popped without burning anything, but his aunt and uncle had a different machine, and he must not have realized it would cook differently. She left out the part about how that was right after the funeral, and the first time she and Ben _really_ let themselves grieve for his parents' death.

"Right," he went. She touched his arm in warning, holding up the needle. The gash in his shoulder still sluggishly oozed blood at the edges; a graze from a gunshot, he'd told her as he came sauntering in the door, shrugging nonchalantly and kissing each of her cheeks until she stopped gaping at him in fishy horror.

 _Peter!_ she'd yelled.

 _Don't worry!_ Peter sing-songed back. His mouth was bleeding, too, which probably meant he'd just left rosy lip-prints in her makeup. _That's just life in the 'hood, Aunt May. I told you about it! No lies! See, I'm doing better at this honesty thing._

She let out a loud, flatulent noise of disbelief. _Are you telling me you know who did this?_

_No one, just some guy. Seriously, it's fine, it won't happen again, I'm just going to ice it._

_No, you are_ not. _I need to sew that up._ He'd looked at her in surprise, and she'd whirled around so he wouldn't see the look in her eyes. No hospitals. Nowhere they'd draw Peter's blood. _And when you get the name of 'some guy,' tell me, because I'm going to go over there and have some very strong words with his parents._

"I remember now." In went the needle, and he flinched, full-body. His voice was quiet, somber, and when May breathed in, all she could smell was the sharp, bloody smell of the steak. "I was so sick of casseroles by that point, I would have eaten bark off a tree."

A beat later, he added, "Jaspar still can't cook worth spit, can he?"

It startled a laugh out of her, only a little unsteady. "Oh, stop. And don't let him hear you say that!"

 

-

 

When May was fourteen, she wanted to be called Serena. Not May. May was a month of the year characterized by bad storms and a lot of mud. 

Serena sounded like a woman that mud wouldn’t stick to, who always took the time in the morning to style her hair, who didn’t go back to the thrift shop three times to stare at the same pair of red pumps, because she wouldn’t need to work up the courage to slip them on her feet, not like May would. No, Serena would buy the pumps and wear them, too, walking with that perfect balanced sway down the halls on Monday. Serena wouldn’t trip, the way May did at her sister’s wedding, spilling flower petals everywhere because her ankle just gave right out from under her. Feet aren’t made for high heels, May knew that, but it didn’t stop her from wanting a pair.

When May was fourteen, she had a best friend named Mary Parker.

That was the year everybody did their own embroidery, Guatemala-style, sewing up the shoulders and collars of peasant blouses and the hems of long skirts and wore their hair like Princess Leia, and if you didn’t have an opinion on John Lennon and Yoko Ono, then you were obviously square.

They were freshman, brand new and suddenly the smallest fish in the pond again, but Mary had lipstick that was fire-engine red, in a little gold tube she bought (by herself!) from the department store, and she curled her thick brown hair like she was a movie star. May’s mother told her that curling irons were tools of vanity, which May always took to mean, _I don’t understand it, so I’m going to be suspicious about it until it goes away._

(Don’t tell, but May tried it once, and she burned her ear.)

May was named for the beauty of springtime flowers and the cusp-of-summer pageantry, supposedly. She was the youngest of five girls, so by the time her parents got to her, they’d run out of grandmothers and aunts to name her after.

“My parents are Presbyterian,” was all Mary would say when asked where she got her name. 

May had nodded, because at fourteen, she had no idea what a Presbyterian was, except maybe a hospital somewhere in the city.

But she was pretty sure there were a lot of dead English queens named Mary, so maybe being Presbyterian had something to do with them. Mary seemed like the type who should be the next in line for a throne somewhere. “Bloody Mary, maybe,” she offered outside of seventh period World History, just to see Mary smile at her with that sideways twist to it, like it got lost on the way to her mouth and only pulled at one side. “The one before Queen Elizabeth. She killed a whole bunch of people and then went crazy.”

It worked. Mary blinked at her twice, and then quirked her mouth. “You’re so weird,” she said, and May felt the coal-warm glow of praise settle in her chest.

When she grew up, Mary was going to marry a doctor and have children and maybe a Volkswagen like the kind they drive in the city. May didn’t think about children much -- they were nice in an abstract way, she supposed, although she didn’t really want one of her own. She’d get annoyed with it after constant exposure, she figured, and you’re probably not supposed to do that with kids, especially if they're your own.

Mary claimed a spot for them at the end of the junior varsity table and straddled the bench sideways, so that when May sat down, it enclosed a space that was just the two of them, making it easy to pretend the sports team behind her didn't exist. “I'm going to have four, I think," she said, speaking with the certainty of an only child who was a bit hazy on the reality of siblings. "Two boys and two girls, so no one will ever feel left out.”

She pushed her lunch box across the picnic table, and May gratefully swapped her leftover turkey-and-mayo sandwich for Mary’s, which had more jam than Mary liked. 

Mary, at that age, was a self-professed carnivore. She hated anything that tasted like fruit, was extremely selective with her vegetables, and often would eat bologna straight out of the package when she came home from school. 

Once, when it was May’s turn to make dinner because it was her sticker on the calendar, Mary rolled up her sleeves and helped, peeling chicken breasts out of their packaging and slapping them down on the aluminum foil sheet May had spread over a pan. Passing through the kitchen to get another Coke (but mostly just so she could have an excuse to spy,) May’s mother exclaimed how nice it was to see a girl who wasn’t squeamish around raw meat. 

“The blood of the freshly-slaughtered helps my cramps,” Mary deadpanned in response.

Dinner had been very quiet and awkward that night, May remembered.

Mary liked science best, and at the end of high school, they weren’t as close as they used to be. Mary went to college to study something May couldn’t really wrap her head around, and May got a job at the dry-cleaner’s because there wasn't enough money for her to go to college, and they mostly stopped seeing each other every day. They made plans to go to the movies, the way they used to when weekend matinees were only 25c instead of a whole dollar, and more often than not, May would be left standing by herself outside the box office, wearing cute platform shoes and clutching an all-denim purse, wondering how apologetic Mary would sound on the phone in the morning. Not apologetic enough -- nothing hurt quite like being forgotten.

And then they met the Parker brothers.

 

-

 

Technically, May met Richard Parker first.

She honestly thought he had to be Mary’s cousin or something, because they had the same last name. All the Alleghenys in the state of New York were related to May somehow (her sister told her it was because they were Catholic and Catholics didn’t believe in birth control, and it was a long time before May got the joke,) so the Alleghenys were everywhere, like particularly doe-eyed, fertile rabbits. May just assumed that it was the same for all families.

But apparently Parker was just a common last name. Richard _did_ have a cousin named Mary, but it wasn’t May’s Mary, Bloody Mary.

They took a CPR class together, every morning at eight AM for ten days, and the first fifteen minutes of the first class was one of those horrible icebreakers that May thought she had finished when she left high school. She felt the same sinking in her that usually accompanied the words "group project," before the man next to her turned to her and said "hi," all before she had the time to deliberate about it.

"I'm Richard," he went.

"No nickname?" she wanted to know. He had a gentle voice, square glasses, and a cardigan the color of oatmeal that bagged a little under the arms. He didn't look like the kind of Richard who would be called "Dick."

"No," he replied, confirming it. "Just Richard."

"The Lionhearted," she smiled, and offered in return, "May Allegheny," and could tell by the way he blinked at her that he hadn't caught the distinction between first and last name, so she added, "Just May."

"No nickname?"

"If you can shorten May, please, honey, tell me, I've been waiting my whole life."

Richard looked at her like he thought she was too young to be calling anyone "honey," and May was eighteen, then, but this was the year everybody wore microskirts and didn't dare bend over at the water fountain, and everyone May knew were trying to grow pot in their basements, only they called it "cannabis" and bought botany books from the flea market and gleefully flagged the appropriate chapters like that made it any less illegal. She had bangs.

She found out that Richard's birthday was in May (ha ha,) and that he had strong opinions about Costa Rica's commonwealth status and how it would be better for both economies if they were finally allowed statehood, which made her think that maybe he was one of the Wall Street lackeys that sat in crowded, dingy offices past normal human hours and squinted at lots of numbers, except it turned out that his real passion was animals. He lit up when talking about his pets: he had three dogs, a colony of goldfish, one iguana named Han Solo, and a little brother named Benjamin. He was studying zoology, he said, with a look in his eyes like he was about to launch into a story he couldn't wait to tell her, which is when their instructor clapped her hands for attention.

Richard looked around with a start. "We didn't get to you!" he said to May in dismay.

"I'm two generations removed from the royal family of Czechoslovakia," she told him, dead serious, and turned around front while he still had that stunned look on his face.

He caught up to her later, before she could reach the subway station and disappear into the morning rush. Change jingled in his pocket and he puffed a little when he said, "No, you're not," picking up the conversation like there hadn't been a CPR course in the middle of it.

Feeling triumphant, she turned around, walking backwards down the sidewalk. "No, I'm not," she agreed. She thought about what Mary would say. "But if I hadn't said it, would you have talked to me again?"

There was a restaurant in Astoria with booths like a proper diner, except it shared a rowhouse corner with a laundromat, so the place always smelled like damp and detergent and the windowsills were cracked from condensation and mildew. It served the best baba gounush and dolmeh in all of Queens, which was saying something because people wrote entire books about the ethnic food in Queens; Richard's mother spoke with an accent so thick that May just nodded at her helplessly, but she gave her free refills on her soda.

Richard Parker said “um” a lot and liked to go off on tangents about the things he heard on AM radio stations, and May had something of a crush on him for the rest of the month.

It wasn’t a loud crush, or a particularly ambitious one, but it was something she nursed in quiet moments, making herself a series of maybes that felt like the pages of a storybook; new and lovely, but ultimately the same fiction every time she returned to it. 

He was very smart, effortlessly the top of his class, and he trailed off mid-sentence sometimes, like he was afraid of boring her, and she liked him in a way that felt unique to her, like nobody else had liked him the way she liked him.

Her crush went nowhere, of course, because Richard didn’t have eyes for anybody but Mary from the second he saw her. She always thought love at first sight was metaphorical, or at the very least a cheap literary device used to justify leaping into horrible decisions as quickly as the plot would allow, but then Mary came into the Parkers' diner and hiked herself up onto the end of the table, completely ignoring the booths on either side. She fixed May's bangs with an airy swipe of her fingertips, mouth quirked at the corner in that fond way, and May made the introductions. Mary watched him scribble in a college-ruled notebook for a moment, before she laughed and said, "cute, but that's entirely wrong."

She picked his pen right out of his hands and wrote something with at least three symbols May didn't recognize upside-down in a corner, saying triumphantly like she knew she just checkmated him, "you'll save a lot of time if you do it like this." 

May picked at the grape leaf wrapping of her dolmeh, took one look at their expressions, and quietly let her chance slip away. 

It took the rest of the night for her crush to implode completely, and afterwards, she ached in a formless way, like its absence had left a sinkhole of gravity in her chest.

 

-

 

He got a bachelor degree, a diploma in a slim black leather binding, and at the party at the family restaurant afterwards, his friend pounded the tabletop to get everyone's attention and raised his glass. "Never have I ever," he began carryingly, to a chorus of loud groans. _I thought the point of being done with school was that we were past this,_ complained Richard's younger brother from further down the table, and Mary wriggled down in the vinyl to settle against May's side, their skin sticking together with the humidity. The friend swept his glass back and forth, meeting every eye before he turned to Richard. "Never have I ever loved Mary Parker from the moment I saw her."

"Oh, shut _up!"_ Mary hollered, and somebody asked the familiar question -- "wait, aren’t they related?" -- but mostly everybody laughed, and Richard didn't even fake embarrassment, just knocked back his drink in a deliberate move.

May drank, too, and thought for a moment that she got away with it, except then Mary hooked an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her tight, saying right in her ear, "I love you, too, babe!"

"You have good taste, May Allegheny!" Richard told her, shouting to be heard above the cheering.

"So do you!" she yelled back, and they grinned, the two of them -- because on this, at the very least, they were on the exact same page.

 

-

 

It was so easy to forget what it was like to be that young, when she had all that hair and her hips didn't hurt when the weather changed, back when she trusted Richard to know and love the parts of Mary she wasn’t allowed to see, and he trusted her to do the same so that between them, Mary was as loved as one woman could be. It had seemed like the thing to do.

She supposed that, in the end, they trusted her with something a lot more important.

“We came straight here,” Mary said faintly, and much too quick. She got up, paced a tight circle around the kitchen table, repeating, “we came straight here, we had to, we came straight here,” and when her hands shook too much that she had to stop and stare at them, May took her by the shoulders and sat her down in the chair. There was a gardenia in a too-small pot sitting on the lip of the sink, trying to spread its tendrils up the window frame, so May picked that up, turned, and deposited it into Mary’s arms. Before they died, Mary’s parents worked for a nursery in Long Island City, and often used their rooms and balcony as a quarantine zone for sick plants that shed spidermite over the carpet and furniture. May remembered springtimes, her and Mary lying on their backs on the deck, looking up at the pansies and tulips blossoming over their heads and talking about last night’s Johnny Carson show.

Mary blinked, fingers curling around the edges of the pot. In the hallway, Richard and Ben were talking lowly and urgently -- or, rather, Richard talking, and Ben nodding those slow, still nods of his, absorbing information like a bell jar in deep water.

Then, she looked up at May so sharply and suddenly that May felt pinned by it. “Don’t let Oscorp come near you,” she said on a fierce whisper. “Mr. Osborne will send Rajit, I think, so don’t let him in. Or --“ she blinked again, rapidly, like someone blown dust in her eyes. “Or Curt, oh god, he could be in on it, too.”

“In on _what,_ Mary?” May asked, frustrated and more than a little frightened, but then Richard filled the doorway, saying, “ _Mary,”_ and her eyes turned opaque with fear and the gardenia trembled in her arms.

Belatedly, with a small surge of guilt, May thought to look for the kid, and there he was, peering at them from in between the banisters on the staircase. In the half-light, his eyed looked back at her, cold, suspicious.

Mary put the pot on the table and stood up fast to hug her. May went, because her body had long, long grown accustomed to Mary’s hugs, muscle memory for where her arms went, for how to lean in, to hold back. There was nothing she knew better.

Then Mary pulled away, calling, “Peter, babe?” and May was left to pull her sweater tighter around her, feeling chilled all the way through. Ben came to her side immediately, and his expression was solemn, and calm, too, like he always had a contingency plan for brothers who came late at night with secrets that needed to be kept and buried. May took her cue from him, and the next time she caught Peter staring at her, she smiled reassuringly.

The next morning, the cops were on her doorstep. The car had been found upstate, by a trucker from Pennsylvania who saw the skid marks where the highway narrowed to one lane and thought to investigate.

There was no evidence of foul play, they told her when she asked. “These things happen,” they said. They said it then and they said ten years later, and it was just as hollow this time, too.

She woke up, and for one horrible moment, didn’t know where she was.

“Ben, honey?” she asked, blearily reaching one hand behind her, but she met the wall and a quilt she knew wasn’t hers. She felt slow, warm and heavy, like there were stones inside her body to drag her back into sleep. The sunlight came into the room from the wrong angle, and she pushed herself up onto one elbow, looking around.

She had her body pillow, the one she used in the summer when it was too hot to use Ben and she needed something between her knees when she slept, because otherwise she woke up with screaming pain in her hip.

On the back of the closet door, Einstein stuck his tongue out at her childishly, and May tracked her eyes up and around, following Broadway posters and framed photographs with their middle-school achievement awards still attached to them, and realized this was Peter’s room. Memory yawned inside of her, and her chest contracted with the force of it, so that she had to lie back down, Peter’s pillow and sheets and the body pillow from her closet.

He must have carried her up here, because the last thing she remembered was lying down on the sofa for the fifth night running. It was so cold downstairs, since it wasn’t quite spring yet and the glass was still missing from the front door, so she’d pulled an afghan up to her chin and settled in for another night of staring at the fabric on the back of the couch. There was no way she could sleep in her own bed, not when it was still unmade from when Ben left it the morning of the day he died, not when he would never come back to pick up that autobiography on his side of the dresser, turn out his light, let her settle her arms and legs around him and grunt good-naturedly when she complained about him getting fat. She couldn’t sleep, not when she knew she could never have that again.

She laid there for a long time, and then downstairs, she heard the toaster spring and Peter exclaim quietly, and a scraping that was probably him trying to fetch a wayward piece of toast from the narrow space by the wall, where the toaster usually flung them when it was feeling temperamental.

Then she put her feet down on the floor and got up, and went downstairs.

Peter’s head jerked up when she scuffled at the linoleum. The black bruises around his eyes were fading into a color like avocados, and he was wearing yesterday’s clothes, which told her it was his turn to not sleep. She felt guilty and grateful in turn.

He finished slathering another piece of toast with peanut butter, jam, and something that looked suspiciously like Velveeta cheese, stuffed it into his mouth, said “morning, Aunt May!” and she realized the sunshine was a lot brighter than it should be, and it was later in the morning than she thought.

“School?” she rasped out in alarm.

“It’s Saturday,” Peter told her patiently.

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Wait, _I_ have work!”

“No, you don’t. I called. You have something like five years of sick days saved up, Aunt May, I think you’re good.” He picked up his plate and went to the sink. 

She watched him for a long moment, his back to her. She hadn’t known anything about raising children -- the first and only time Ben asked her if maybe she wanted any of their own, at a summer barbecue at her sister’s place, she’d shoved him into the pool -- so when Peter landed on their doorstep like baby Moses send adrift in a wicker basket, she had to pull parental instincts out of thin air, and wound up mostly drawing on how her own mother raised her. Or, more accurately, how she _wished_ her mother had raised her.

They’d commuted into the city every day, so that Peter could keep attending the same school. On the subway in the mornings, she’d tucked him into her side on the bench and read him the _Wizard of Oz,_ and Laura Engalls Wilder, and _Dragonsong_ \-- he hadn’t liked _Little House on the Prairie_ as much as the others, reaching around her arm to distractedly fold little geometric triangles into the corners of the pages, although he did crane his neck to look at the illustrations: Laura together with her family, building homes out of sod and logs and snow, whatever they had on hand, wherever they found themselves, and May paused, watching the ticking of his wistful eyes, and felt sad.

Once, she’d rearranged her entire life around the absence of Mary from it, and for the first time, she thought she might be able to do the same with Ben.

“Oh!” said Peter, turning around again and gesturing with the butter knife still in his hand. “Mega-lame called while you were asleep --“

“Don’t call her that,” May admonished him, going to the cabinets to pull down a bowl for her own breakfast.

He frowned after her indignantly. “You call her that all the time!”

“Because she’s my sister and I’m allowed to.”

“ _Fine._ Aunt _Megan_ called and said she would stop by with something for dinner and some handouts she got on storage units for Uncle Ben’s things or whatever.” He didn’t sound happy about it, and she caught him stealing glances at her out of the corner of her eye.

“Okay. So I should call her back and tell her to mind her own beeswax.”

Peter goggled at her. “You would never.”

“You’re right. I should call her and tell her to fuck off,” she said, just to hear him drop his knife in shock. It went clattering into the sink basin, right on cue.

“Aunt May!” he yelled, scandalized. He looked around, then went rummaging under things on the counter, lifting half-finished loaves of bread, spare plastic bags, leftover cheese biscuits from the trip to Red Lobster they took for Ben’s birthday two weeks ago (those should be tossed,) and finally surfacing with a mug, a cheap touristy knick-knack from Staten Island with the Statue of Liberty on it, which he extended to her. Loose change rattled inside of it. “Pay the cuss cup!”

She laughed, but he just looked unrepentant and rattled it at her again, so, obediently, she got her purse from the living room and put two quarters in the mug. “I won’t do it again,” she promised him solemnly.

“Cross your heart?” he went, and she crossed.

He showered and got changed while she ate her breakfast, and when he came back downstairs with his skateboard under his arm and backpack on, she expected him to beeline straight for the door with a quick, “be back later, bye!” to ward off any questions, but instead, he stopped and lingered uncomfortably in the doorway.

“Peter?” she prompted, when he just scuffed at the floor with the toe of his sneaker.

“If you --“ he started, stopped, tried again. “If you can’t sleep -- don’t -- don’t -- you shouldn’t have to. Come upstairs, okay? I’ve got lots of room. Don’t sleep on the sofa, it’s not good for you.”

She got to her feet, and before he could dodge her, she had him cornered in the doorway, cupping his face in her hands; his bruised eyes and cut lip, gaze darting anywhere but at her. She wondered what she could say that he wouldn’t hear as an accusation.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she said, quiet, and rubbed at his cheek with her thumb. “Take care of yourself, too, okay? You’re all I have left.”

He looked at her, unreadable, and then he said, “Same,” and kissed her cheek, hissing because it hurt.

Then he twisted away, and was gone.

 

-

 

Ben Parker snuck up on her.

She wasn’t expecting him, wasn’t paying attention at all, so it was completely effortless, the way he appeared one day and surprised her by never leaving.

May Allegheny never traveled more than 10 miles from the place she was born, on a gymnastics mat in the basement because, her mother claimed, she was sick of hospitals and had this birth thing pretty much down already, thank you very much. She was bedridden with chickenpox the day everyone else took a field trip to the state capital, and they didn’t have the money to send her to Washington DC when a trip was offered her eighth grade year.

Some people were forged from clay in a kiln and had adventure fired into their bones -- but May was sediment, May was mud, May was the childhood room that you outgrew in the years you weren’t paying attention, the tree that looked so much taller from your bedroom window when you were younger. Some people dreamed of knowing a place so well they were called by name in their favorite bakeries, had an order standing ready at the coffeeshop, knew the best place to watch the 4th of July fireworks, but May actually was that person. She knew that the Rusty Oven’s best sourdough bowls were on Mondays and Thursdays, that the barista with the bleached skunk stripe in her hair would add two shots of white mocha to your order for no charge if you asked right, and the gumball machine at the dry cleaner’s just needed to be hit right at the base, no quarter necessary. She spent her whole life gathering these facts.

And that was fine, the world needed people like that.

May went through her twenties feeling settled in a way that people kept telling her she couldn’t possibly be.

She was kissed for the first time when she was twenty-six, had sex two weeks later, not concerned with whether or not that was too late or too fast. He was someone she’d known in grade school, before she met Mary, lost track of after that, and rediscovered on a subway platform during a maintenance delay. He’d grown up into a playwright with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his bicep, a vest of bombs strapped to her chest and a barbed-wire halo wreathing her head, and when the opportunity presented itself, she took it, because as far as risks went, he was an acceptable one.

“ _Well?”_ Mary demanded, passing over all this with a wave of her hand, like the fellow wasn’t important, setting herself right down next to May and leaning in.

May thought about it, flicking the teeth of a comb with her thumbnail.

“No, thank you. It’s like a tampon that moves,” she decided, wrinkling her nose up, and Mary tossed her head back and laughed at that.

“It is _not!”_

May used her distraction to grab a handful of Mary’s hair, fisting it to provide a different point of pressure and dragging the comb through the snarls at the end. She and Richard had a dinner with Norman Osborne tonight; some self-congratulatory award banquet thing for people with intimidating IQs and too many Swiss bank accounts, so May was helping her get ready, holding up earrings and lipstick as required.

Richard’s parents had Peter for the night. He was a little over a year old at that point, and May could see something in Mary itching to be pregnant again -- “I want four kids,” said the fourteen-year-old girl with the department store lipstick in her memory -- even though she’d picked Mary up from the appointment with the obstetrician where she’d been told she probably shouldn’t risk it, not when carrying Peter had put so much stress on her.

She put up with another ten minutes of Mary grilling her for details -- was she going to see him again? No, no repeat performance? Probably a good idea, if he was that underwhelming. Did she want to try the bar scene sometime? Or, hey, this was 1996, what about the Internet? -- before she threw a tube of mascara at Mary’s back and told her to shut up. Mary shot her an affronted look.

“I do not need to get laid,” May said firmly. “It was never an important part of relationships for me, Mary, you know that.”

With a sigh, Mary sank down onto the comforter next to her and said, “Of course I do. I’m sorry, babe. I got excited. I … I just want you to be happy.”

May turned to face her, drawing her leg up onto the bed. “Do you think I’m not?” she asked. “Do you think I’m not perfectly happy, right here?”

“What, being my best friend?” Mary arched her eyebrows teasingly. “Being a lady-in-waiting behind the scenes of the Queen Mary show?”

“Yes,” said May, and when Mary just looked at her, she smiled and said dryly, “Trust me, friendship with you is twice the work of most relationships and we don’t even get mutual sexual satisfaction out of it. Actually, now that I think about it, all friendships are like that, and why shouldn’t that be enough for me?”

There was a second’s pause, which Mary could have filled with a quip and they could have laughed, and then another one, and then May knew that Mary was going to take it seriously.

Sure enough, by the third heartbeat, Mary’s arms were around her neck, squeezing tight.

She chuckled, careful of Mary’s carefully-styled hair when she returned the hold, and said, in case it bore repeating, “I’m _happy,_ Mary, believe me.”

Mary pulled back, but only just far enough that she could cradle May’s face between her palms. 

“You’re my best friend too, you know,” she said, quiet as a confession in church, and leaned in, kissing the arch of May’s cheekbone. “The best,” and the other one. “The very best there could be, May. I don’t think I have the words to tell you how much I love you.”

Later, much much later, when people asked her who the single greatest love of her life was, she always thought of that moment, there in Mary and Richard’s bedroom, Mary’s hands on her face and smelling of baby powder. 

It didn’t make that love any less, for having never been sexual, for May having gone on to marry Ben and live the rest of her life with him. She won’t let anyone say it is.

She knew Ben Parker only peripherally, then.

He was the youngest of two brothers, like something out of the start of a storybook, and he saw his older brother go one way and promptly went down the complete opposite path. He won a line of bowling trophies that stood on the hearth until she made him box them up because honestly, and he spoke Greek with his mother and cooked in the restaurant during the lunch rush, and came in in the evenings sometimes to help bus tables and wash dishes. If it was a slow night, he usually came out and sat with her and Mary and Richard and their friends.

Not long after Richard married Mary on a crisp March day (“he was the most efficient choice in a husband, really, none of this changing-my-name hassle,” Mary kept joking, sweeping her gown out of the way every time she turned, because that was the year everyone’s wedding gown had a train,) he and Jaspar got contracted work up in the Catskill Mountains, building a neo-modern-whatever getaway for some famous screenwriter May’d never heard of, and when he came back, he was different, noticeable in this entirely new way.

Where May’s heart felt full, settled in her chest and heavy with love, Ben crept around to its shadow, imprinting himself into her life without her noticing, like the negative of the sun etched on the inside of her eyelids, visible every time she blinked.

Ben didn’t mind being called honey, the sex was a lot better now that she knew how to do it, and when he asked her to marry him, he stuck his hands in his pockets and shuffled his feet on the sidewalk and looked too scared to even meet her eye, and it didn’t seem fair that May could only just then realize that she loved him, because how could she have missed that?

She stared at him, and her very first thought was, _And have the same last name as Mary?_

Ben probably knew about that Mary-shaped space in her heart, but he never asked, because that was the nice thing about love. It wasn’t really that complicated.

 

-

 

May wasn’t stupid. Sure, she hadn't gone to college, and she may not be a grade-A genius like Mary or Richard or Peter, but give her some credit: she knew who Spider-Man was from the instant she saw the footage on the evening news.

She raised that boy, bathed that boy, shuttled that boy to school every morning, talked to that boy about masturbation and privacy until his ears burned and he built a remote-triggered lock for his door, took out hems for that boy when he shot up to six feet over the course of a single summer and, when that got tiresome, taught that boy to sew so he could do it himself -- you think she wouldn’t recognize her boy anywhere, especially dressed in skintight Spandex like a particularly limber Vegas showgirl?

Please.

Don’t be insulting.

They evacuated Manhattan in the wake of a biological attack, forcing May to let her sister Megan bunk on the floor with her kids. She watched the news and made popcorn, and Peter crept in at midnight with a sheepish smile, a bullet in his thigh, and the carton of eggs she asked for.

April faded into May, May into June. She settled her finances around Ben’s death, remortaged the house, and Peter finished his junior year at Midtown Science without getting himself smeared on somebody’s windshield. She made a cake to celebrate the occasion.

On the first real breathlessly hot day of summer, Jaspar came over to fit the front door with a new pane of glass. They’d been making do with boards and garbage bags until then, and when May gestured helplessly at him, Jaspar tugged at the ends of his walrusy whiskers and said, “I owed Ben one, ma’am.”

“You never owned Ben anything, Jaspar, don’t be silly,” she said. “Besides, you brought us casseroles, remember?”

He brightened. “Oh, did you like them?” 

Somewhere behind her in the house, Peter had a sudden suspicious coughing fit.

She let him have at it. She made lemonade. She found Peter sitting on the roof, drumming the end of his pencil against the top of a book with Norman Osborne’s name in the title, and then she grabbed her purse and took the two-hour trip out to the state penitentiary.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course, and she had to wait for them to do a background check, but finally, visiting hours began and they signed her in. She set her purse on the floor and sat down in the plastic chair.

A beat later, Dr. Curt Conors sat down on the other side of the glass, his eyes shocked wide. His hair hung lank, and his orange jumpsuit was a size too big.

She lifted the phone to her ear.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” he said shakily, once he picked up the receiver, reaching awkwardly across his body with his good hand. “I saw your name on the visitor’s sign-in and expected to find myself talking to a ghost.”

May didn’t need to ask. “We always did have a tendency to answer to each other’s names in class. Differentiating between 'May' and 'Mary' only got harder when we married brothers,” she heard herself say. “Why, are you feeling haunted?”

He pinned the phone to his shoulder with his chin, scratching uncomfortably at his neck. Green-hued scales flaked off onto the collar of his jumpsuit.

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of making your acquaintance --“

“Spare me,” said May quietly. “You know exactly who I am, Curt. I was always Mary’s plus-one to those stupid parties Oscorp put on, because Norman Osborne liked to show off his geneticists like dogs at a Eukenuba show.”

He blinked. His expression didn’t change.

“Now, I’ve have a very trying couple of months, and before that, a very trying ten years, so please, cut your second-fiddle sycophantic bullshit and tell me what’s going to happen to my nephew.”

There was no hesitation.

“Peter is a genetically-manufactured mutant, not unlike myself,” and this time when he blinked, his eyes lidded sideways. She was pretty sure he did that just to freak her out. “His genetic sequence is cross-contaminated with a species of spider I’m proud to say only exists in one place on earth, and that’s in the labs in Oscorp Tower. The same species of spider that Mary and Richard Parker won an award for engineering seventeen years ago.”

He stared at her, and for a long, pointed moment, neither of them said anything.

And then it clicked, so violently May swore she could _hear_ the pieces grind together as they slotted into place inside her head. “Are you --“ she demanded, and couldn’t finish the thought. The horror of it swallowed her completely.

“The world’s first successful, living example of cross-species genetics,” he said softly. “Is the child of the world’s top two cross-species geneticists. What a coincidence.”

Impossible. This was ridiculous.

“Are you asking me to believe that Richard and Mary experimented on their own _son?”_

“Do you honestly think that none of our researchers have ever been bitten before?” he fired back. “You don’t see any of them wearing leotards and swinging from buildings. He came to my house earlier this year --” _Oh, Peter,_ May thought acidly, because of course he did, “-- and he gave me the algorithm I’d been trying to compute for ten years. He just had it sitting in his _head.”_

“I’m not listening to this,” she said flatly, and stood up.

“ _Wait!”_ he yelled, losing his cool.

She sat down again, suddenly furious. “They were my _best friends,_ Curt. The people I loved more than anyone in the world, how _dare_ \--“

“They were _my friends too,_ and believe me when I say I thought you were too blinded by your affection to see what they were really capable of, what lengths they’d go to to keep Osborne from getting his hands on their science. I’m sorry,” he went, suddenly much softer, and May realized there were tears dripping down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“Do I --“ she exhaled, gulped air, and came up with nothing.

“No hospitals,” Dr. Conors said. “Don’t let him go anywhere where they might draw his blood. And, um. He probably shouldn’t have unprotected sex. Ever.”

“Oh, sure. That’s a conversation I’m looking forward to having.”

His mouth quirked, drawing up to one side, and then he said, “I didn’t kill Mary, Mrs. Parker,” and she flinched back like he’d struck her in the face with it. “I had nothing to do with that. I couldn’t -- they were your life, but they were my _future.”_

 

-

 

She took the bus home, because she needed the time to think: about Mary’s difficult pregnancy, about how secretive they’d been -- and May had noticed, May had _noticed,_ but she just thought that was the way young, ambitious couples were, and had given them space. She never asked.

Not once.

When she got back to the house, there was a new pane of glass in the door, and Gwen Stacy was sitting on the porch, no makeup on, a thousand-yard stare sunk in the shadows of her face. On the sidewalk, Peter was teaching one of her younger brothers how to balance on a skateboard; one of his old ones with the formulas scrawled in Sharpie on the bottom. 

“Lean, lean, lean, there you go!” he was chorusing as she walked up.

He didn’t look like a mutant. He looked like Peter, her Peter, soft hair and too-long limbs and a careful way of not looking directly at the pretty girl on the porch, like she was the sun and he was going to go blind.

She sighed.

“Hey, Aunt May,” he said, lifting a hand to wave.

“Peter,” she returned. “It’s so nice to see you not bleeding. Hello, dear,” she added to Gwen, who had to blink three times before her eyes brought May into focus. “Could I bother you? I could use a young pair of eyes to check some fine print for me. I don’t want to accidentally sign away my house from under me.”

“I can do that!” Peter said indignantly. She looked at him very pointedly, then at Gwen, then back. “Or,” he fumbled. “Gwen’s eyesight is probably better, yeah, she should --” and he turned away, escaping that situation with no finesse.

Inside, out of the sun, Gwen suddenly looked much smaller, with no substance left; a paper figure etched in graphite. 

May poured her some lemonade. “I thought you might like the excuse to not pretend,” she said.

Gwen’s eyes refocused with less trouble this time, and she took the glass. Her throat clicked dryly when she swallowed. “Mrs. Parker?”

“Go on, have a seat,” she waved a hand at the sofa, and Gwen sat at the command, seemingly without meaning to. For one strange, disconnected beat, she reminded May of the first time she met Richard, in his soft beige cardigan and inoffensive footwear. Gwen dressed the same way. “I just thought, your mother must be so busy --“

“We manage,” she cut in immediately, by rote, like it was a line she’s had to deliver too many times. “NYPD has a fund set up for the families of servicemen who were killed in action. Mom is … we manage.”

“And because of that, it’s your job to put on a face for your brothers,” May extrapolated, with the knowledge of one who has put too many people in the ground. “And it hurts. How old are they?”

“Thirteen, ten, and seven,” Gwen said promptly, and then her mouth wobbled. She looked betrayed, but it was too late; her throat constricted visibly, and she set her lemonade down on a coaster and covered her face.

Gingerly, May sank down next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

This earned her a watery chuckle. “No offense, but I don’t think you’d really understand.”

“Honey,” said May, gently but firmly. “When I was your age, I wore skirts that would optimistically be called belts today, and we all grew pot in our basements until the cops cleared us out, and I was so in love with Peter’s mother I couldn’t see straight, no pun intended.”

Gwen lifted her head and stared.

May gave her shoulders a squeeze, and then let go. “And I buried my husband two months ago. So if you need to take a second to not be strong, I think I can handle that for you.”

 

-

 

It was never a question of how much of Mary she saw in Peter, whether he grew up to have the same dimples, the same crinkle to his eyes or the same way of popping his spine when he stretched. 

She never looked for any of that. After all, it wasn't his job to be the memory of the people May loved most. That wouldn't be fair.

She wasn't prepared. She never expected it, that someday Peter could come downstairs in Richard's old thick-framed glasses and Ben would inhale sharply like he'd been sucker punched, that he could try to sneak into the house at one in the morning with blood rose-red across his teeth and for a split second, the only thing May could see was his mother under that tarp, her face shattered into gore from the impact with the dashboard.

It wasn't even a memory she should have to carry, if not for Norman Osborne, if not for those spiders, if not for whatever secret algorithm they hid in the fabric of Peter's bones, if not for whatever horrible, greedy goon of Osborne's drove her and Richard off the road that night.

Mary, her Mary, her Bloody Mary, who she would have followed anywhere, but she couldn't follow her into the ground.

 

-

 

These days, Peter came to pick her up from work.

Not every day, of course, and sometimes he arrived breathless with his clothes all askew like he’d pulled them on not ten minutes earlier, which made Josie pull her mask down to hoot and catcall and make lewd comments that turned Peter’s ears bright red and made May snap, “Josie, he is a _minor.”_

Other times, she would wait, and if he didn’t show up in half an hour, then he wasn’t coming, and she’d go home by herself, walking a little faster where the street lamps were dark and crossing to the other side if the bars looked crowded. After she pulled off her shoes and nylons at home, she turned on the radio to an AM station and let the news tell her about whatever it was that held Peter up.

She told him each time, of course, that he didn’t have to -- she was perfectly capable of walking herself home. She wasn’t feeble or helpless or frightened, she didn’t need a hand to hold, and she’d done it before, on the days Ben had to pick up extra shifts. He did that a lot when Peter was younger; whenever he could get away with it, because they were ten years behind on starting a college fund.

Ben always held her hand on those walks home, even when his palms were blistered and his knuckles swollen. And no, May didn't need the escort, but she sure did like the company.

So it surprised her, the week after his funeral, when she finished closing and locked the front door to the dry cleaner’s, and found Peter waiting for her on the curb, bouncing a little on the soles of his feet.

“O’hana, Aunt May,” was all he said, when she spread her hands at him in a wordless gesture of _explain._ “Nobody gets left behind.”

She remembered how, as teenagers, she and Mary would trudge the whole long way up to the sculpture park, the one that perched on the very edge of the East River with the view of the Midtown skyline. Mary would swing her legs and look out and wonder, “Why would anyone want to live anywhere else but New York?” because Mary could be elitist like that sometimes. And May knew there had to be places in America where she would feel safe walking home at night without her husband or nephew escorting her -- it must be nice there.

June melted away into July, July into August, and then, one day, a customer came into the cleaner’s about fifteen minutes to close.

Peter was already there, switching a Tootsie Pop from one cheek to the other and tapping his fingers on the countertops and realigning the picture frames on the walls so they hung straight -- and in hindsight, May probably should have had that boy tested for ADHD, because that behavior definitely predated the spider bite.

“I’m sorry,” she said instead, looking up from the cash register. “We’re about to close --“

And the woman -- mid-forties, with an afro highlighted with streaks of gold and silver that spread in an aureole around her head in a way that looked effortless but probably took hours of work -- blurted out, “Oh, I know, I’m so sorry, I hope this is just a quick fix, but I think you gave me the wrong order?” She held up a garment bag to demonstrate.

May looked at her properly, and placed the face with the clothes: always came in after 5 o’clock on Fridays with the same garments, like clockwork, to the point where May didn’t bother leaving her messages on her answering machine anymore: she knew when the clothes would be ready.

“Ms. Delaney, of course,” she said, and stretched her arms out over the counter to accept the garment bag, pushing the plastic up to read the tag. “Yeah, no, these definitely aren’t yours, let me go check.”

Sure enough, there they were, still on the conveyor, right there between “Delacroix” and “Dfevenche.”

She brought them out, saying, “I am so sorry about that!”

“Don’t be!” said Delaney brightly, signing off on the correct tag. “It was bound to happen sometime. I’m just glad I got here before you closed.”

She had striking eyes, May noted; a greeny-gold that made her think of brass fixtures in antique stores, and when she gathered up her keys and the proper garment bag and set to leave, she paused on the threshold and looked back.

“It _is_ May, right?”

Pleased, May said, “It is!”

Delaney grinned. “My favorite month of the year,” and then she left, pushing out through the door, cowbell clanging against the glass in her wake.

Too amused to even be professionally embarrassed about the mix-up, May went to punch Delaney's ticket through, except when she turned it over, she found big block letters written on the back. **FOR MAY:** and then a phone number, underscored with a line of x’s.

“Oh,” she breathed, her heart turning over in her chest like she was fourteen all over again. She felt like laughing, so she did, and it swelled out of her and spilled over.

She finished closing, counting the money in the drawer and flipping the sign on the door. She locked it, whistling to herself, and when she turned around, Peter was there, offering her his arm like she was royalty. It was a nice night, the moon already risen and the air still warm, and May couldn’t stop smiling.

She tucked her arm through Peter’s. “You ready?” he asked, putting his hand over hers.

“Lead on, your majesty,” she responded, and didn’t wait for his reply before she set off, putting one foot in front of the other and pulling Peter along with her.

 

-  
fin


End file.
